June 4, 2017

On "State of the Union" today, Jake Tapper, talking to Virginia Senator Mark Warner, played a clip of Hillary Clinton speaking in a way that seemed a bit wacky:

TAPPER: Hillary Clinton said something very interesting this week that reminded me of something that you said in a hearing not long ago. She said that she believes that the Russians, in their interference in the U.S. election, must have been guided by Americans. Take a listen.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D), FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE (on video): The Russians, in my opinion, and based on the intel and counterintel people I talk to, could not have known how to best weaponize that information unless they had been guided. And here's...

Asked: "Guided by Americans?" She responds:

CLINTON: Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.

Actually, if you take all the words seriously, she's saying almost nothing. "Weaponize" sounds scary, but all that was "weaponized" was "information," which I think mainly refers to things her people wrote in their own email. And she just has an "opinion" that in order to "best weaponize," some Americans would have been needed to give advice. But she doesn't even say that the the info was "best weaponize[d]" or even that the Russians were doing the weaponization. And it's all only an "opinion."

I thought it sounded wacky because I heard it, initially, as an assertion that she knew Americans had to have helped the Russians weaponize information. Parsing it now, I feel that she chattered out a bunch of words that seemed to mean a lot but she preserved completely deniability by actually saying nothing. Check the transcript!

But Tapper asks Warner:

TAPPER: Is that true? Do you agree?

See if you can find anything that looks like an answer in Warner's word salad:

WARNER: This is one of the questions we have to sort through, again, one of the questions I was asking when I was out on the West Coast. It does seem strange, it appears, that Russian-paid Internet trolls who created bots were then able to put forward fake news, selective stories in a way that seemed targeted. Now, we don't...

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: Targeted at certain states?

WARNER: Targeted it at certain states, at certain demographics. We don't have fool proof [sic] of that. So, I'm not where Secretary Clinton is in terms of jumping to a conclusion. But this is one of the many questions that we need to investigate.

What did he just say? That he thinks internet trolls passed stories along? That they did it with "bots" (is that the "weaponization" Hillary referred to?)? This seems so incredibly trivial. Imperfect information flows on the internet. This is the world we are dealing with and adapted to. Why are we talking about this amorphous junk for an entire year without getting any closer to substance? Tapper must know this is embarrassingly insubstantial:

TAPPER: One of the big questions, of course, is, is there any evidence of collusion that you have seen yet? Is there?

WARNER: Listen, there's a lot of smoke. We have no smoking gun at this point. But there is a lot of smoke....

Later, in a panel discussion, former Democratic Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm went big with the smoke metaphor. The former Attorney General of Virginia, a Republican, Ken Cuccinelli, brought up Warner's reference to smoke. Cuccinelli said there's "no evidence" of "collusion." (I think it's weird that everyone is just saying "collusion" without specifying who supposedly colluded with whom.) Granholm reacted in a way that prompted Tapper to say "I appreciate your continued use of the metaphor. That was very, very skillful."

GRANHOLM: There is a lot of smoke because each day there are pieces of wood that are added to the fire. And what Mark Warner also said is one of the things they're going to ask is why Donald Trump, on the day that Jim Comey announced that he was doing an investigation of Russian collusion, calls Dan Coats, head of the director of National Intelligence and says, can you push back on that? And then calls Admiral Rogers and says the same thing. All of these things -- then he fires -- all of these things add up to not just smoke but potentially a bonfire. We'll see.

Was that very, very skillful? "Bonfire" sounds big, but it's still just "potentially a bonfire." When I hear the kind of speech we're seeing from Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner, and Jennifer Granholm, I think: This is how conspiracy theorists talk. They stress the thing they imagine is true, though they don't have proof, and they keep asserting that they are going to find the evidence later.

Parsing it now, I feel that she chattered out a bunch of words that seemed to mean a lot but she preserved completely deniability by actually saying nothing.

Me thinks you give her too much credit. She "chattered out a bunch of words that seemed to mean a lot" - which is standard political speak - but she had no thought of preserving "completely deniability by actually saying nothing". It's just what she does.

We have been talking that way for a year because Obama wants us to - keeps the focus and the investigations away from the horrible accomplishments and illegal activities of his administration. If he wanted what was best for America, he would have stopped this long ago.

Don't look at what is literally being said. The whole point is to feed the Narrative (that Trump is not our President because the Russians).

Poll was done in January that showed half of Hillary voters believed the Russians had literally hacked into voter machines in WI, MI and PA to change the results. Similarly, polls showed that by the time W Bush left office, over half of registered Democrats believed that he had colluded (there's that word again!) with al Queada to bring down the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Everyone in the Democrat leadership and MSM knows that Russians literally hacking the election machines is absurd, but they also know that giving CNN another excuse to stream headlines saying "Russians Hacked the Election" will lead the average low information voter to assume there must be something to this, literally.

Water Closet and Phishing Gate did not create information, but confirmed what everyone already suspected about Democratic principles and Clinton specifically. These events were unique in that the revelation bypassed the traditional gatekeepers (e.g. NYT, WaPo, PBS) that protect democratic and commercial interests that have grown progressively out of alignment with the people's interests in America and globally.

Althouse said..."Was that very, very skillful? "Bonfire" sounds big, but it's still just "potentially a bonfire." When I hear the kind of speech we're seeing from Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner, and Jennifer Granholm, I think: This is how conspiracy theorists talk."

Skill isn't even required. They're just throwing chaff for their fellow travelers to run with.

And they said it was Trump who wasn't going to accept the election results.

I think that there's considerably more proof that Seth Rich was murdered by a person or persons acting at the instigation of the DNC for his having extracted damaging Email messages and sending them to Wikileaks than there is proof of any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Not to mention that murder is a felony, and a very serious felony even when committed by Democrats in a thoroughly Democrat-run city, while there is no such crime as "collusion" unless it rises to a conspiracy.

I am morally certain that the one conspiracy theory is dead wrong, and I hope that the Seth Rich conspiracy is wrong, too.

I listened to a number of clips of crooked Hillary in this interview. I think she believes that "the Macedonians" hacked her gps so she couldn't find her way to Wisconsin. She mentions Macedonians 3 times during the interview.

Recode paid her to come to the conference and do this interview.

I think crooked Hillary has been spending too much time walking in the imaginary "woods" by her house. Or as others might call them "drunken stupor"

Hillary puts me in mind of that old Charles Bronson movie, Telefon. The phone rings, the code word is spoken, the KGB sleeper agent is activated. Maybe these bots, they're the 21st century version of that, sending coded messages over the Internet that became embedded in our brains and we mindlessly went out and voted for Trump.

How long until people recognize that the emperor has no clothes? I.E., Hillary is just a dumb politician. She is not speaking in code or generalities, she is mouthing words that she thinks make her look smart. There's nothing there worth paying attention to. Her career as Senator and SoS highlight that she is dumb. Like most of the people ruling us. Ever heard John Cornyn talk? Exactly the same. An empty suit full of earnest hot air accompanied by a serious, caring look on his face.

Can we see specific examples of fake news stories and where they were initially posted?

The only “evidence” I’ve seen put forward so far is an internet page I cannot find again, dammit – maybe some reader saw it too. The article kept citing “RT” as interfering with the election. I was wondering, “Who the hell is “RT?”

Finally I comprehended. “RT” stood for “Russian television.”

Get it, readers? Russian television, or, if you will, “Russian fake news” was the “culprit.” You may ask yourself, “How could something on Russian television affect an election in America?”

The answer is – it can’t – except in the imagination of the Left.

Can any of the anti-Trumpers cite examples? We’ll not hold our breath.

I wish these neutral journalists would apply the Trump standard to the allegations and remind us that they are made without evidence. But it seems that the fact that Hillary says it is evidence enough.

And why is the only sample of fake news the story about the Pope supporting Trump? Was that supposed to help him or hurt him? Can't they give us some other examples?

In any case we should employ the same standard here that the Clintons use: if not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt in a court of law, not only is it a sign of stainless innocence but also shows the black, hollow souls of the accusers.

Hillary Clinton will never admit publicly, and possibly never even to herself, that the Russians had nothing to do with her loss. It all had to do with her. She was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign.

Her staff's emails were hacked and then leaked in a deliberate, organized way to inflict maximum damage on her campaign. The emails were not dangerous as long as they were private, of course, and might not have been all that damaging once they became public except someone, some Americans probably, according to Hillary, understood how and when to reveal them, how to weaponize them as it were, to attack her campaign to inflict maximum harm.

It's meant to sound super scary, like weaponizing anthrax. It was the evil Russians and their American stooges making a dirty bomb and blowing up her campaign. Or the other way around maybe. The evil Americans (Republicans) and their Russian stooges.

And a monster. She is literally one of the worst people this country has ever produced and frankly anything bad that happens to this disgusting piece of shit, who has been in the position to harm me and has and who has pledged to harm me further, can't happen soon enough.

Remember when the collective left blamed Sarah Palin for the AZ shooting? She was to blame for Jared Louhgner's actions. The leftwing lie machine coordinated the fake news.

Jared never went to Sarah's website, but that little fact did not stop the left from weaponizing and coordinating their big lie - they blamed Sarah Palin anyway. They used a single word on her web-site to do it.

The coordination and the weaponized BS are all a product of the leftwing D-lie machine. Same D-lie machine that is coordinating the Russian and Trump conspiracy "smoke" lie.

There isn't even smoke here that isn't completely pumped out by the media and the Democratic Party. What you have with these people are wannabe political arsonists.

At some point, someone is going to have to produce actual verifiable hard evidence of this collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign just to keep the story alive.

The truly indictable part of this panel, though, was that not a single journalist pointed out that Warner, Granholm, and Clinton (in her talk) had basically answered "No" to the question of whether they had or had seen evidence supporting this collusion. The Democrats and the media supporting them are colluding in what appears to the biggest lie ever told, and one they intend to die putting over on the public. It is quite likely we are witnessing the stupidest people on the planet at work here.

And of course, Hillary and the Dems just know that those conniving Russkies aren't smart enough to have figured out how to damage her on their own. I think she watched too much Rocky and Bullwinkle growing up and got her knowledge of Russians from Boris and Natasha.

Every moment Democrats and their media enablers spend on ephemeral Russian plots is a moment they are delaying the hard choices required to once again become a viable political force in America. Six months following their humiliating defeat it appears they haven't given it a bit of thought, which may indicate they find the task impossible.

Sally- thank you for the response. One thing that always mystified me about this whole thing is, why does Clinton think the contents of her campaign mail is so damaging to Clinton herself when revealed? Doesn't that imply that she knows she could only win by hiding the truth from the electorate?

That's assuming that people knew about /cared about the contents of the mails at all, which personally I don't think I've seen any evidence of.

Out here in Comanche land, we have been known to make a fire with buffalo chips. And it seems to me that buffalo chips are pretty much the same as the "logs" that the Democrats keep throwing on the fire. Yeah, there's a lot of smoke and hot air--but it's all "weaponized" buffalo chip style material from Schumer, Clinton, Warner, Pelosi et al. Every now then Obama and Reid rise up and dump some more chips on the fire.

At some point they are going to have to withdraw from this hysteria. Their base was already unhinged to begin with, and when all this emotional investment ends in nothing, the snake oil salesmen who implied there are impeachable offenses will be stoned in the public square.

So... anyone want to predict how they will backtrack this? Whst will be the excuse? A vast right wing conspiracy? Our Russian "shadow government" shut down the investigations just when they were about to discover the truth?

I'm going with "bumper sticker slogan for libtards to scream while they jam their fingers in their ears, like "Bush lied, Troops died". The Left will manufacture a Conventional Wisdom that Trump conspired with the Russians and stole the election' even though there isn't a shred of evidence to back it up.

"Doesn't that imply that she knows she could only win by hiding the truth from the electorate?

That's assuming that people knew about /cared about the contents of the mails at all, which personally I don't think I've seen any evidence of."

I suppose every politicians relies to some extent on "hiding the truth" from the electorate, or at least trying to be ahead of "the truth", to be able to manage its reveal in the most favorable way possible. Hillary didn't get to do that with the campaign emails.

And I don't agree that the emails weren't important to anyone. I found it helpful to know that her own people thought the private server was a real problem and that it was stupid of her to have done it.

I also found the hack itself to be helpful in making up my mind, that she was too incompetent to make sure that kind of thing couldn't happen or not happen as easily as it did. Or more likely, as with the private server, she just lacks a fundamental understanding of technology. I mean, at the basic user level, which most of have that I think. Except her, she's so used to be coddled and driven around, I just don't think she gets how the world works nowadays. So it's all a big conspiracy against her.

And an easy way to tell these anonymous sources are full of shit - you have evidence our American President was installed by a foreign power but you won't present the evidence publicly? Because your fricken government job is more important than the Republic or the Constitution? Give me a fricken break.

If I was your boss I would fire you, not for leaking your lies to the press, but for being a self-serving coward. Because you certainly aren't interested in serving the American people.

The Kremlin paid an army of more than 1,000 people to create fake anti-Hillary Clinton news stories targeting key swing states, the leading Democrat on the committee looking into alleged Russian interference in the US election has said.

Senator Mark Warner, the Democrat ranking member, and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Republican Senator Richard Burr, appeared together at a press conference to give an update on the investigation ahead of the first witnesses appearing today.

Mr Warner said: “We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports – and we’ve got to get to the bottom of this – that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas.

“It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.

“An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hi-jack the most critical democratic process, the election of a President, and in that process, decided to favour one candidate over another.”

The key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania which Mr Warner named all fell narrowly - and unexpectedly - to Donald Trump. ....

[end quote; the article continues]

So, the reason people said that "Clinton is sick" and "Clinton is taking money" is because of a Russian facility where there are a thousand internet trolls.

.... The Senate Committee will examine whether the Trump campaign co-ordinated with the Russians to hire the army of trolls. ...

Journalist Adam Chen, now a staff writer at the New Yorker but a freelancer when he investigated alleged interference in the US election, claimed in a podcast with Longform that a large number of Russian trolls were now churning out support for Mr Trump

“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.

A total of 20 individuals have been asked to appear before the committee members for private interviews, but no names apart from Mr Kushner’s were confirmed during the press conference.

From an article titled "Hillary Clinton’s Deceptive Blame-Shifting" by Robert Perry, published in Consortium News on June 1, 2017.

[quote]

.... [Senator Mark] Warner didn’t specify where his information about the “trolls” came from but it paralleled a claim by freelance journalist Adam Chen who asserted in a podcast with Longform that Russian “trolls” began writing favorably about Trump in late 2015. (The CIA/FBI/NSA report also apparently alluded to the same report without mentioning the name of the journalist or specifying the number of alleged “trolls.”)

“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching,” Chen said, referring to a 2015 reporting project that he turned into a rather thinly sourced New York Times Magazine article accusing a Russian oligarch of funding a professional “troll” operation in St. Petersburg, Russia. “I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff.”

Although such “troll” and “hacking” complaints are treated as a one-way street – coming only from the evil Russians – the reality is that US intelligence agencies, their allies and U.S.-government-funded “non-governmental organizations” have mounted similar operations against Russia and other targets.

It is always difficult to nail down precisely where such operations are originating, but the Russians have cited previous cases of malicious hacking aimed at senior officials, including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, whose accounts were hacked in 2013 and 2014 including publication of a false resignation and a confession of wrongdoing.

In 2015, the “Panama Papers,” a vast trove of documents purloined from a Panamanian law firm, became an investigative project that involved a USAID-funded news outlet and led to attacks on President Vladimir Putin for corruption even though his name did not appear in the documents.

So, this high-tech spy-vs-spy game – if that’s what it is – does not appear to be originating entirely from the Russian side of the street. But the US intelligence community is not going to divulge what it knows about the attacks against Russia, only what it can “assess” about Russia’s possible attacks against Western targets. ...

"I just don't think she gets how the world works nowadays. So it's all a big conspiracy against her."

Puts me in mind of the little old white-haired lady in front of me at Hy-Vee today... just could not figure out how to use her embedded-chip credit card. She tried every possible permutation before (with gentle coaching from the cashier) getting the right combination. The chip! It goes in the reader!

From an article titled "The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks", written by Adam Chen and published by The New Yorker on July 27, 2016.

[quote]

For six months, starting in the fall of 2014, I investigated a shadowy online Russian propaganda operation called the Internet Research Agency. The agency has been widely reported in Russian media to be the brainchild of Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin. At the time, it employed hundreds of Russians in a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, where they produced blog posts, comments, infographics, and viral videos that pushed the Kremlin’s narrative on both the Russian and English Internet.

The agency is what is known in Russia as a “troll farm,” a nickname given to outfits that operate armies of sock-puppet social-media accounts, in order to create the illusion of a rabid grass-roots movement. Trolling has become a key tool in a comprehensive effort by Russian authorities to rein in a previously freewheeling Internet culture, after huge anti-Putin protests in 2011 were organized largely over social media. It is used by Kremlin apparatchiks at every level of government in Russia; wherever politics are discussed online, one can expect a flood of comments from paid trolls.

When I began researching the story, I assumed that paid trolls worked by relentlessly spreading their message and thus indoctrinating Russian Internet users. But, after speaking with Russian journalists and opposition members, I quickly learned that pro-government trolling operations were not very effective at pushing a specific pro-Kremlin message—say, that the murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was actually killed by his allies, in order to garner sympathy. The trolls were too obvious, too nasty, and too coördinated to maintain the illusion that these were everyday Russians. Everyone knew that the Web was crawling with trolls, and comment threads would often devolve into troll and counter-troll debates.

The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.

What Volkov said stuck with me as I continued to follow the trolls. Since the article appeared, last summer, the Internet Research Agency appears to have quieted down significantly. Many of the Twitter accounts stopped posting. But some continued, and toward the end of last year I noticed something interesting: many had begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of Donald Trump. Exposure to even small amounts of Russian politics can induce severe bouts of paranoia and conspiracy-minded thinking, and it seemed logical to me that this new pro-Trump bent might well be an attempt by the agency to undermine the U.S. by helping to elect a racist reality-show star as our Commander-in-Chief. At the time, I found it funny. The agency was a well-funded but often hapless operation—it created a cartoon character that was a giant buttocks to spread anti-Obama propaganda, for example—and this seemed like another of its far-fetched schemes to poison the Internet.

"A complete lack of evidence is simply proof of just how far the conspiracy reaches."

Isn't the main piece of evidence the fact that Clinton lost the election? The result proves that a conspiracy existed to steal the election from her. I think it's pretty clear that's what Hillary herself believes. She had all that money, all those celebrity endorsers, every poll, all the pundits, the media cheering her on, it's Sherlock Holmes simple, once you eliminate the impossible (that Hillary was a bad campaigner with lots of baggage and people didn't trust her), whatever remains, however improbable (the Russians hijacked the election), must be the truth.

It was a conspiracy with weaponized information and fake news manipulating the stupid Americans in places like rural Wisconsin to vote against her.

When I [Adam Chen] began researching the story, I assumed that paid trolls worked by relentlessly spreading their message and thus indoctrinating Russian Internet users. But, after speaking with Russian journalists and opposition members, I quickly learned that pro-government trolling operations were not very effective at pushing a specific pro-Kremlin message ....

The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content ....

[unquote]

So, the US Intelligence Community is in a frenzy because journalist Adam Chen says he was told stuff by unidentified Russian journalists, opposition members and activists.

RICHARDThen be your eyes the witness of their evil.(shows his arm)70Look how I am bewitched! Behold mine armIs like a blasted sapling withered up;And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch,Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,That by their witchcraft thus have markèd me.HASTINGS75If they have done this deed, my noble lord—RICHARDIf? Thou protector of this damnèd strumpet,Talk’st thou to me of “ifs”? Thou art a traitor—Off with his head. Now by Saint Paul I swearI will not dine until I see it done

Richard III -Bill Shakespeare

Believe me or be judged disloyal, no matter how reasonable your doubt.

In the meantime, of course, the Russians know exactly what they did and didn't do--as far as we can tell, probably not much--and therefore will infer that the US left and MSM are utterly insane, determined to put party over country at any cost.

"And an easy way to tell these anonymous sources are full of shit - you have evidence our American President was installed by a foreign power but you won't present the evidence publicly? Because your fricken government job is more important than the Republic or the Constitution? Give me a fricken break.

If I was your boss I would fire you, not for leaking your lies to the press, but for being a self-serving coward. Because you certainly aren't interested in serving the American people."

Funny how American "traitors" like Snowden and Manning end up looking braver and more principled than these American "patriots."

The only guilty party is Hillary, who facilitated a major sale of US uranium deposits to a Russian company essentially owned by the government and waited to act until Bill got his speaking engagements and the Clinton Foundation got their donations.

The Clintons are grifters who tried to steal WH furniture the last time around.

"Every moment Democrats and their media enablers spend on ephemeral Russian plots is a moment they are delaying the hard choices required to once again become a viable political force in America. Six months following their humiliating defeat it appears they haven't given it a bit of thought, which may indicate they find the task impossible."

Matched only by the Republicans apparently unable to do anything with their majorities in both houses. I would say that both are good things except the latter means that the Democrat mischief of the last 10 and a half years remains in place.

From an article titled "The Agency", written by Adrian Chen and published in The New York Times on June 2, 2015:

[quote]

... I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” ....

For two and a half months, [former agency employee Ludmila] Savchuk told me, she had worked 12-hour shifts in the building, always beginning at 9 a.m. and finishing at 9 p.m., at which point she and her co-workers would eagerly stream out the door at once. “At 9 p.m. sharp, there should be a crowd of people walking outside the building,” she said. “Nine p.m. sharp.”

One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month. During her time in the organization, there were many departments, creating content for every popular social network: LiveJournal, which remains popular in Russia; VKontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and the comment sections of Russian news outlets. One employee estimated the operation filled 40 rooms.

Every day at the INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster.

Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities.

Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder. ...

As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says.

Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian.

"What Volkov said stuck with me as I continued to follow the trolls. Since the article appeared, last summer, the Internet Research Agency appears to have quieted down significantly. Many of the Twitter accounts stopped posting. But some continued, and toward the end of last year I noticed something interesting: many had begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of Donald Trump."

It was fine, apparently, for the Crooked Hillary campaign to pay Twitter and blogging commenters last summer. We saw a bunch of them here working shifts.

... [in the summer of 2014] the INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY had begun to troll in English. One document outlined a project called “World Translation”; the problem, it explained, was that the foreign Internet was biased four to one against Russia, and the project aimed to change the ratio. Another email contained a spreadsheet that listed some of the troll accounts the agency was using on the English-language web. After BuzzFeed reported on the leak, I [Adrian Chen] used the spreadsheet to start mapping the network of accounts on Facebook and Twitter, trying to draw connections.

One account was called “I Am Ass.” Ass had a Twitter account, an Instagram account, multiple Facebook accounts and his own website. In his avatars, Ass was depicted as a pair of cartoon buttocks with an ugly, smirking face. He filled his social-media presences with links to news articles, along with his own commentary. Ass had a puerile sense of humor and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. He also really hated Barack Obama. Ass denounced Obama in posts strewn with all-caps rants and scatological puns. One characteristic post linked to a news article about an ISIS massacre in Iraq, which Ass shared on Facebook with the comment: “I’m scared and farting! ISIS is a monster awakened by Obama when he unleashed this disastrous Iraq war!”

Despite his unpleasant disposition, Ass had a half-dozen or so fans who regularly liked and commented on his posts. These fans shared some unusual characteristics. Their Facebook accounts had all been created in the summer of 2014. They all appeared to be well-dressed young men and women who lived in large American cities, yet they seemed to have no real-life friends. Instead, they spent their free time leaving anti-Obama comments on the Facebook posts of American media outlets like CNN, Politico and Fox News. Their main Facebook interactions, especially those of the women, appeared to be with strangers who commented on their physical appearance. The women were all very attractive — so attractive, indeed, that a search revealed that some of their profile photos had been stolen from models and actors. It became clear that the vast majority of Ass’s fans were not real people. They were also trolls.

I friended as many of the trolls on Facebook as I could and began to observe their ways. Most of the content they shared was drawn from a network of other pages that, like Ass’s, were clearly meant to produce entertaining and shareable social-media content.

There was the patriotic Spread Your Wings, which described itself as “a community for everyone whose heart is with America.” Spread Your Wings posted photos of American flags and memes about how great it was to be an American, but the patriotism rang hollow once you tried to parse the frequent criticisms of Obama, an incoherent mishmash of liberal and conservative attacks that no actual American would espouse.

There was also Art Gone Conscious, which posted bad art and then tenuously connected it to Obama’s policy failures, and the self-explanatory Celebrities Against Obama.

The posts churned out every day by this network of pages were commented on and shared by the same group of trolls, a virtual Potemkin village of disaffected Americans.

Big Mike said...I think that there's considerably more proof that Seth Rich was murdered by a person or persons acting at the instigation of the DNC for his having extracted damaging Email messages and sending them to Wikileaks than ...

That's a seriously crazy walk on the wild side for a mathematician, most of whom are familiar with the number zero. And, who capitalizes the 'E' in email?

.... The English-language trolling team was an elite and secretive group.

Marat Burkhardt, who worked in the forums department, was asked to try out for an English-language team but didn’t get the job.

The only person I spoke with who worked in the English department was a woman named Katarina Aistova. A former hotel receptionist, she told me she joined the INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY when it was in a previous, smaller office. I found her through the Anonymous International leak, which included emails she had sent to her bosses, reporting on the pro-Putin comments she left on sites like The Blaze and Politico. One of her assignments had been to write an essay from the point of view of an average American woman.

“I live in such developed society, so that people have practically ceased to walk on foot,” she wrote.

When I emailed Aistova, she wasn’t eager to talk. She told me she had been harassed by critics of the INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY after her email appeared in the leak; some men had even come to her door. She would meet me for an interview, but only if she could bring her brother for protection. I agreed, and we met at an out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant.

Aistova and her brother made an unusual pair. She was a short young woman with mid-length brown hair, dressed all in black: sweater, leggings, big wedge boots. She insisted on paying for my coffee. ...

He, by contrast, was a hulking skinhead with arms full of Nazi-themed tattoos, most prominent among them a five-inch swastika on his left biceps. .... He wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the skull-and-crossbones insignia of the SS Totenkopf division, which administered the Nazi concentration camps. I asked him what his T-shirt meant. “Totenkopf,” he grunted. During the interview he sat across the table from Aistova and me, smiling silently behind his sunglasses.

Aistova said that she worked for the INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY for a month and a half. The majority of her work was translating news articles from English to Russian. The news articles covered everything from Ukraine to traffic accidents. On a few occasions, her bosses asked her to leave comments on American news sites about Russia, but she said that they never told her what to say.

That's a seriously crazy walk on the wild side for a mathematician, most of whom are familiar with the number zero. And, who capitalizes the 'E' in email?

Such a well reasoned argument. But you have pretty much been mailing it in for months now. It must suck to see everything the left bases itself on be a complete lie and to be losing so many elections because you are all empty.

"Which would make the ghouls feasting on the death of Seth Rich what exactly?"

Frankly, I don't know enough to comment, though I will say one is an individual human tragedy and the other is an effort to impede the functioning of a legitimately elected government. The scale of one dwarfs the other.

Original Mike said...Frankly, I don't know enough to comment, though I will say one is an individual human tragedy and the other is an effort to impede the functioning of a legitimately elected government. The scale of one dwarfs the other.

Or, one is a tragic murder exploited shamelessly and the other a minor inconvenience to a bunch of useless politicians.

Who is exploiting his murder? You guys brought Seth Rich into this buy claiming the wikileaks dump was a Russian hack. Admit it, you're just pissed because Seth Rich passing those docs to wiki blows your entire narrative.

But no worries. I'm calling the NYTs to offer a scoop - a commenter on Althouse named ARM approached me offering to sell DNC docs that prove DNC rigged voting machines against Bernie Sanders in primaries.

Btw, can I have your stuff? Since, ya know, yo're leaving the game and all.

It was fine, apparently, for the Crooked Hillary campaign to pay Twitter and blogging commenters last summer. We saw a bunch of them here working shifts.6/4/17, 8:01 PM Rene Saunce said...Poot called me - asked me if I could halp embarrass Hillary. I said - I'm on it, Poot-man.6/4/17, 8:01 PM Fen said...Speaking of internet troll farms, I'm sure many of you have noticed that certain Lefties here become oddly quite every so often something Unexpected happens in the news cycle.

It's almost like tbe printer at Soros HQ is jammed again, leaving the Left stranded without Today's Talking Points.

Simple really. Every accusation is a confession. The media may as well be OJ Simpson writing every day "If I Did It."

What they accuse others of, is what they do. That's how it should be investigated.

...

Blogger Fen said..."his parents - "

That's not how the Rule of Law works. We don't drop investigations because of someone's feels.

That's as stupid as saying we should not hold impeachment hearings on Bill Clinton's perjury and obstruction of justice because Chelsea is being teased by her classmates over it.6/4/17, 9:08 PM

It's not stupid. It's tactical. More than that, it is their usual psycho power move: Investigate who we say! Don't investigate who we say!! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!!

ARM himself, his nick, is classic. Like Ceci n'est pas un pipe. Duh, of course it is a pipe! And ARM is some kind of opposite or reverse of contrapositive of reason. He's the Bearded Spock of reason. Just another Squealer out to turn black into white.

That's a seriously crazy walk on the wild side for a mathematician, most of whom are familiar with the number zero. And, who capitalizes the 'E' in email?

@ARM, I guess the vague truce we arrived at last Memorial Day is over and done with? Good while it lasted. I almost concluded that you were a member of h. sapiens, and sad to see I was wrong.

Now be a good little self-proclaimed moderate and go read what I wrote a second time, this time making some effort at comprehension, okay? I described both the theory that Seth Rich was murdered by the DNC and the Russian-Trump collusion as conspiracy theories, merely ascribing a higher probability to the former. That doesn't say that I believe it, only that I do not find it totally implausible.

Probably unlike you, I actually read the articles that purport to debunk the theory that Seth Rich was killed at the instigation of the DNC, and they really do nothing of the kind. The debunking generally rests on two main premises: (1) it was pointless to kill Seth Rich since the damage had already been done, and (2) for the conspiracy to be real we'd have to believe that the FBI and the city police were in on it. The former point is trivial to debunk -- I find many Democrats to be mean-spirited, nasty creatures (yeah, ARM, you too) who would cheerfully shoot a man in the back for what they view as "disloyalty" to a party they value over the country itself. And as for the latter, well, I've dealt with the DC police over the course of the many years (1969 to 2016) that I lived in or around Washington, DC, and I find it quite plausible that the despicable Cathy Lanier could find a handful of officers to not look too closely at yet another District homicide. The FBI "enjoys" the reputation of being very sensitive to political winds, and keep in mind that Comey was still its head back then. So point #2 is not at all solid.

And despite the efforts of FactCheck.org, Polifact, and Snopes to say that there is "no trustworthy evidence linking" Seth Rich to WikiLeaks, it is fair to ask why Julian Assange would have posted a $20,000 reward for evidence leading to the conviction of the murderer of Seth Rich if there was no relationship between the two of them? To your knowledge has Julian Assange done likewise for any other murdered person in Washington, DC?

And as to who capitalizes Email? Someone who wrote his first programs for money (meaning not for classwork) in the 1960s and who has been using Email since its earliest days. I wish you stupid punk kids would grasp the notion that there was a time before Email, a time when 110 baud was the best transmission speed one could get for remote access to a computer, a time before the Internet, a time before the World Wide Web, a time before even dumb terminals, when one's code was entered into the computer by punch cards or punched paper tape. I capitalize Email and Internet because I was around when they first arrived and that's how we did it then.

My first modem experiences were 300 bps (1978). My father-in-law splurged for a 1200 bps Hayes, and we thought we were in Heaven.

There was a CS prof over at Fullerton State who required his students to do all their programming assignments on cards. He finally gave up in 1982, and let the students choose whether to use cards or those newfangled terminal thingers. Not surprisingly, everyone chose terminals.

Big Mike said...I find many Democrats to be mean-spirited, nasty creatures (yeah, ARM, you too) who would cheerfully shoot a man in the back for what they view as "disloyalty" to a party they value over the country itself.

It is one thing when a dummy like Crazy April continually promotes the Seth Rich conspiracy. It is another thing entirely when an educated man or woman does the same thing. When smart people start spouting conspiratorial nonsense the center cannot hold. At a minimum there should be some standard of evidence that extends beyond the fact that you hate Democrats. To be of any use, some minimal standards of logic and evidence should be maintained in public discussions.

I am not a Democrat and did not vote for Hillary. As I have noted previously, as best as I can tell, none of the so-called 'leftists' who post here regularly actually voted for Hillary. This is an extremely biased sample of the population. Conspiracy theories are more likely to find a toehold in groups that are cutoff from the mainstream, such as this one. The logical response is to demand a higher standard of evidence for extraordinary claims, not simple accede to the lowest common denominator.

@ARM, there is no center, not anymore. And for gosh sakes I'm not "pushing" the Seth Rich theory, merely pointing out that, unlike the "Trump-Russia collusion" conspiracy theory, the probability of its being true is not zero. You are showing me a thoroughly closed mind. Consider opening it. A first step might be to read the Snopes and Polifact and FactCheck articles skeptically and critically and open-mindedly. Look for weasel words like "trustworthy" as in "no trustworthy evidence," and be sure to ask yourself whether Assange offering a reward for evidence leading to the conviction of Rich's murderer isn't some sort of evidence.